Two mornings before my leave-taking I was breakfasting in the dining room with Dirck when he placed a message alongside my plate as we finished our tea. I read:
Daniel,
Our society seems ever to be confessing its flaws to you, just as you seem to have been born to witness tragedy and to elevate people from trouble. I owe you my life. My banker is setting up an account in your name and will be here today to talk with you. You will now have an income for the next fifteen years of your life. By then you should be wealthy in your own right.
Luck,
Dirck
When I realized what he had written and raised my head in grateful wonderment, Dirck was gone. As good fortune embraced me, baleful new shadows fell upon the Ryan family. The young Molly erupted with sores and boils over her entire body, a disease of no ostensible origin that was finally ascribed to the terrors that had taken seed in her upon her witnessing Toddy’s murder. Joey Ryan was set upon twice as he ventured little distances from the mansion, and one boy sought to pluck out his eyes. Hearing this, Margaret Ryan ran to Hillegond and fell prostrate on the parlor rug, cursing the enemies of Ireland, cursing America, cursing God and His mother, cursing the murderer of her husband and all his heirs and ancestors, cursing the curse that was on her and her children. She stopped cursing when Hillegond patted her head and cooed at her; then she sat up and swore she would leave Albany for a new place, swore it on the suffering body of Molly Ryan, on the threatened eyes of Joey Ryan, on the hate that lived in her own body and which was the blood, fire, and venom of her will to survive this hell of black devils.
Lyman Fitzgibbon rescued the Ryans from family dementia by finding Margaret a charwoman’s job in a Syracuse orphan asylum, where her children could find haven away from Albany; and so one day they were gone from the mansion, yet frozen forever in my memory as paradigms of helpless, guiltless suffering. I sensed in the days after they left that a life such as theirs would probably not be my lot, that any troubles befalling me in later days would emanate more from my own willfulness or sapheadedness; that I was not destined to be a passive pawn of exterior forces. One exposes great hubris with such confession, but there was truth in my intuition.
On the day I was to leave, Hillegond supervised the farewell breakfast, for which she baked bread from an old Dutch recipe. Laden with cheese, raisins, sugar, and walnuts, the bread, for Hillegond, was symbolic of plenty, her parting wish for me. Dirck kept his farewell as brief as he could, but his handshake was as strong as a bear’s trap as we separated.
Will, who had already given me a letter recommending me as a gracious, trustworthy young soul of plentiful talent and potential, an effusion of praise I was sure no one would believe, came to pick up Dirck and report to us that Lyman had sent him a letter, to be printed in the Chronicle, publicly repudiating The Society and resigning from it.
Will gave me his personal copy of Montaigne’s essays, telling me it contained enough wisdom for several young men like myself, and he urged me to read it constantly and in small doses. He also gave me some agates of advice. Sitting at the end of the dining-room table, where Hillegond and I were eating alone, holding his hat in one hand and his walking stick in the other, he delivered his message to me in words whose precise shape I cannot reconstruct, for I felt terrible leaving Will’s newspaper, which had become the home of my soul; and the thought of departure clouded my memory severely. Though I searched for those precise words all the rest of that day, my findings fell far short of Will’s impromptu eloquence. What he said, as best I could reconstitute it, was this:
“Remember, Daniel. The only thing worth fighting for is what is real to the self. Move toward the verification of freedom, and avoid gratuitous absolutes.”
I confess I did not know what he meant by the two final words, but which are exact, for I recorded them indelibly on my memory because of their strangeness. Will also added that I should be wary of marriage “before the age of comprehension,” which he placed at twenty-five. “No man younger than that has any idea what women are all about,” he said. “And while after twenty-five they have even less, they are somehow readier for the game.”
His speech brought tears to Hillegond’s eyes, for it made my departure increasingly real to her: yet another adventure of the heart taking its leave. She gave me quite contrasting counsel as to matters of love.
“I know you and Maud saw what happened on the night Magdalena came back from the dead,” she said. “I did not see you there, but John did, and he enjoyed the audience. I won’t apologize for what you saw, but I do say that life is never what you think. We seem to discover love in the most awkward places, and not always with the appropriate people. But Daniel, young dear of our hearts, love is better than wheat. Love is worth what it costs to find it, and I do know you’ve found it. I also know you know everything that I say before I say it. You are such a smart boy — smarter than Dirck was at your age, and he was smart as a Dutchman’s thirst. I shall miss you, Daniel Quinn, and I demand that you come back as soon as you can and make your home here. Bring Maud if you like, and if not her, then another. But you have made yourself valuable to the Staats family, and you shall never want again as long as we live. God bless your good sense and Godspeed on your new journey.”
I had my train ticket in hand and was packed and ready for departure well before the appointed hour. Emmett Daugherty came to pick me up, and said we’d have to watch the Irish circus before I left, a comment that confused me. But he explained that today was the departure day as well for the new immigrants: homeless Irish who had come to Albany to find life, and finding none, were being ushered elsewhere — driven, really, from the city by authorities unable to cope with the mounting cases of Ship Fever the newcomers had brought with them. It was widely held that fever could not prosper in open spaces, and so the immigrants were being sent to the western plains, where they could build cabins, and forage in the outdoors for their lives, becoming as one with the wilderness, safely distant from the fetid city, where fever seeds wax strong.
I embraced Matty and Capricorn in turn, vowing I would see them both again, then was smothered in my final enfolding by Hillegond and her abundant bosom, which made me weep with love for the woman to whose open arms I swore anew that I would filially return.
I climbed onto the seat of Emmett’s open wagon as he threw my baggage aboard, and I turned my final gaze upon the mansion, its shrubbery, its turrets, its gables and conical towers, its sprawling porches and beautiful lawns of intense verdancy, its acres of bosky slopes, and that vast metabosky terrain I had always judged to be the Staatses’ primeval forest, and along which their road coursed toward the city. All this I surveyed with saddened eye, for I knew that this time I was truly leaving, perhaps never to return, despite my avowals, and sensing in my most anxious reaches that this was all slipping away forever, even before I had begun to command power over its lushness. This was no longer mine, and I was to be alone on the road, a waif in gentleman’s clothing, aimless and homeless, pointing myself in the vague direction of an even more vaguely defined duty to a stranger I barely knew but loved with unquestioning fervor.
I wept openly upon my separation both from the grandeur of this vision and from Hillegond’s chest full of heat. And then, as I accepted the unknowable emptiness of my future, Emmett clucked his horse into motion.